Capacity Planning Tools: Which do you use?

There's tremendous interest in capacity planning tools these days. Capacity planning is and has always been important, but modern UI technology offers a lot of opportunity to create tools that really facilitate the process.

As a UI engineer, I'm always interested in what forms of these tools emerge as people build and rebuild them to try and meet the demands of a wide audience yet still be individually useful. In the end, what I typically see is a tool or two of choice supported by some good ol' spreadsheets, which leads me to believe that a unified capacity planning tool should be a hybrid of the two. It should collect the "what was, what is" information and expose it, and then by letting the user interject environment parameters (load, time, scope) and organizational data and functions (e.g. cost and ROI computations) into some kind of spreadsheety-pivoty sort of thing, produce highly relevant information and visual perspectives that can be manipulated as needed, persisted for future use and tuning, and whatnot.

Anyway, with that said:

- Do you engage in formal capacity planning for your virtual environment?

- What tools do you use?

- What general and/or specific features do you find particularly useful that drives you to use that/those tools?

- Regarding VMTurbo planning tools, do you use them, what do you like, what would you change, what's missing?

I use the planning tool in Turbonomic, you can find it under the plan tab in the platform. It allows you to run "what-if" capacity planning scenarios based upon the current state of your environment. I find it to be extremely useful!

I think one piece that is often overlooked when considering capacity planning is how it relates back to real-time management. If a capacity planning "tool" is separate from the engine that is keeping the environment healthy in real-time, it is fundamentally flawed in my opinion. Capacity planning should be an extension of what is occurring in real time.

Most people capacity plan, not because it's an enjoyable activity, but because they need to ensure health in the future at the lowest overall cost to the business. How is that possible if we use something to manually baseline off of another product or based on what is considered "normal?" What-if "normal" isn't necessarily healthy? Well our future forecasting then is based on a fundamentally incorrect baseline. Just my two cents!